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No More Guantanamos

An interfaith coalition in Tallahassee, Florida, prepared the following plan to accept three Uyghur detainees from Guantánamo Bay in their community. This plan, along with another plan prepared by a Uyghur community in Fairfax County, Virginia, were instrumental in Judge Ricardo Urbina's October 2008 ruling that the 17 Uyghur detainees at Guantánamo must be released into the United States. The Obama administration won its appeal of the ruling.

The Uyghurs are an ethnic group of circa 20 million persons in Xinjiang Province in the extreme west of China. The fact that they are Muslims and have aspirations to independence from China have led to their being treated in a very hostile manner by the Chinese government.

Ahmed Errachidi is a gourmet chef who worked at the Westbury Hotel in Mayfair (London, England). He had two young sons, one of whom was in dire need of a heart operation in 2001. He left for Pakistan in September of that year to buy silver jewelry there which he hoped to resell in Morocco in order to raise the money for his son's operation. However, in October of that year, when the US invaded Afghanistan, he left Pakistan to attempt to help civilians affected by the war.

Dilawar was a 22-year-old peanut farmer from Yakubi, Afghanistan. He used to drive the tractor on his family's farm, but eventually switched to driving a car his family bought him, which he used as a taxi. He picked up two passengers in Khost, and was then stopped at Fire Base Salerno by militiamen which the US had hired to provide local security around the base. His car was searched, and an electric stabilizer was found. He was accused of being involved in the rocket attacks on Fire Base Salerno earlier that morning, and chained to a fence with his passengers overnight.